The present invention relates to food manufacturing apparatus and, more specifically, to an apparatus for enabling a user to selectively position individually shaped and cooked food products as they are discharged from an automatic cooking machine whereby immediate and subsequent packaging of a desired quantity of the shaped and cooked food products will be made possible with a minimum of manual labor.
In the high capacity production of shaped and fully cooked food products, it has long been desired to be able to automatically mass produce such food products from the raw material batch to a final package with a minimum of contact by food workers to minimize both the labor costs involved and the sanitation steps required to maintain the sanitary integrity of the food product. While a number of different devices have been produced and are available on the market for automatically cooking large batches of individually shaped food products, the final packaging of the food products still remains a labor intensive endeavor in many applications. One of the primary causes of the high labor costs involved in such operations is the requirement for handling a shaped and fully formed food product that is relatively difficult to mechanically automate at a reasonable cost without risking destruction of a large number of the often delicate food items. One such item of particular interest are fried taco shells which are highly popular in many fast food outlets. However, such shaped food products, particularly since they are fried and are constituted by a relatively weak base such as corn starch and/or flour, are relatively fragile thus rendering them particularly susceptible to crushing, cracking or breakage. This can result in a high percentage of rejects in a batch run which can materially increase the costs of the product particularly in view of the increased number of production runs that will be required. To overcome this difficulty, it has previously been necessary to employ workers to visually inspect and glean out defectively formed or substandard food products. In addition, the packaging of such products in a set or variable number per unit package has required further labor expenses since the worker must often individually orient a number of the discrete food items to permit compaction as by nesting into a useful commercial package.
In addition to the increased costs required as a result of sanitary considerations, as noted above, production capacity has also suffered where workers must handle individually cooked food items to facilitate packaging. Specifically, in the case of fried foods, protection from the heated food as it emerges from the cooking zone must be afforded each worker which tends to reduce the production efficiency of such workers. This is a result of either the protection that must be employed in the form of cumbersome gloves or intermediate utensils which enable each worker to handle the extremely hot food items or is a result of the delay required before the food items cool sufficiently to enable manual packaging or orientation for packaging.
It is an object of the present invention to avoid the foregoing difficulties and to provide an apparatus and method for controlling the movement and orientation of individually shaped and cooked food items as they emerge from a cooking zone of a conventional automatic cooking apparatus whereby the individual items will be transfered to a take away conveyor for packaging in a selected orientation on a take away conveyor.
According to the present invention, a conventional cooking apparatus is employed to deliver individually shaped and cooked food items to a discharge station where the guide means of the present invention is located to control the movement and orientation of each individual food item as it is discharged from the cooking zone and which controls the orientation of the individual food items as they are passed to a take away conveyor for packaging.
With the arrangement of the present invention, breakage of individual food items will be greatly minimized by eliminating rough handling of the individually cooked items while maintaining a desired orientation that favors compaction of a plurality of food items for packaging.
The foregoing and other objects of the present invention will become apparent as consideration is given to the following detailed description taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings, in which: